Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The BBC White Season only shows how little Auntie has really changed

Rod Liddle says these tokenistic programmes demonstrate that the BBC’s view of the vast majority of people in this country remains appallingly patronising. The Corporation has not renounced its bad old metropolitan ways at all

issue 15 March 2008

I hope you are enjoying ‘White Season’ on the BBC — a brave and groundbreaking attempt by the corporation to devote 0.003 per cent of its airtime to issues which bother 92 per cent of its licence payers. One of the senior commissioning monkeys at the BBC, Richard Klein, admitted that white people — some of whom he has met — have been underserved by the corporation, and especially ‘working-class’ white people. Mind you, it is surely difficult to serve such a hidden and secretive tranche of the population, especially when they live beneath stones and only venture out to get drunk and shout ‘darkie!’ at passers-by. But at least the BBC has tried to understand these awful people and shown them where they are going wrong.

One of the films during the White Season was about a white (i.e. British) girl growing up in a part of the north of England which is heavily populated by Muslim immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.

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